Some New York Bricks
By Matthew Kilbane
This short essay pairs two poets who relied in their time on the materials of New York City — its brick and mortar, its shatterable glass — in order to test the promise that poetry matters. Naomi Replansky (1918-2023) and June Jordan (1936-2002) each found they could get poems to admit their own possibilities and limitations as forms of action in the world by writing about what shelters New Yorkers, what they can and cannot see through, what goes up in flames or breaks apart, and what endures. Readers of Gotham may be interested in the way this infrastructural imagery draws language back, again and again, to the particularities of New York history. For Replansky and Jordan, poetry’s most salient social meanings emerge from awareness of the city as an inexorably unfinished construction, something poets and their readers — neighbors, whatever their address — must build together.
1. A brick not used in building (Naomi Replansky)
A brick not used in building
Can smash a window pane.
For anyone with ears to hear
Let it be said again.
A brick not used in building
Can smash a window pane. [1]
This poem was written in 1943 by the Bronx-born, Brooklyn-based poet Naomi Replansky. Despite their stirring assurance, these lines pivot on a volatile indecision. By the lights of one reading, the poem denounces the potential disaster of blasted potential, how easily constructive use can spoil into destructive abuse. Writing with the world at arms and toiling each day as a lathe operator on factory floors at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Replansky might have been thinking about the causes and consequences of total war. Or perhaps, in a naturalist mood, she was aiming to echo the plight of the brick-wielding Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) (Replansky began a relationship with Wright the year she wrote the poem). [2]
Given its date of composition, it’s easy to imagine Replansky had in mind the deadly Detroit riot of June 1943, or nearer to home, the Harlem riot of August 1943, memorialized for readers of James Baldwin in his “Notes of a Native Son” (1955). The riot broke out just hours after Baldwin’s father’s funeral; “On the morning of the 3rd of August,” Baldwin writes, “we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. [3] But the poem’s range of reference is capacious. When it finally appeared in print in 1952, for instance, we can imagine its readers recalling more vividly the riot in Cicero, IL the previous June, when a white mob of 4,000 destroyed the apartment of its new Black tenants, Johnetta and Harvey Clark Jr. and their two children. Whatever specific violence the poem remembers, the rhetorical target of its metaphor is — at least on first reading — clear enough: those forms of negligence and abandon that weaken and rend the social fabric.
And yet, the taut syntax that thrills the poem suggests a countervailing degree of exciting possibility. Those with “ears to hear” who are willing to listen twice to the statement that opens and closes the poem might hear in that word “can” not a frightening consequence but an expedient capacity: a brick not used in building can still, after all, smash a window. The self-reference in the poem’s fourth line, which transfers potential agency to the reader via the passive voice (who is doing the saying?), endorses this whisper of defiance. Replansky wrote harrowingly of catastrophes all her life—the Holocaust, the atom bomb, whiteness, the brutalities of industrial capitalism, etc. A close reading of “A Brick Not Used in Building…” suggests she did so in an art form she understood as powered and haunted by a deeply unstable form of potential energy. Let the poem be said again, and it turns in on itself: that is, it turns metaphorically into a brick, poised between construction and destruction. Either the poem implies that building with bricks is a good thing (a constructive thought) or it intimates that bricks sometimes ought or need to be thrown. This repeated mantra about the potential energy of a brick is also, then, a poem about poetry’s possibilities in social space, its latent “microsocial effects. [4]
In 1964, Replansky found her attention drawn once again to the infrastructure of “this loud town, where easy money flows, / All ways but down. [5] The poem “Fire in the City,” from 1972, recalls the fires just then beginning to rage in the Bronx:
The stoop is still there.
It leads nowhere.
The house burned down,
the beds turned black.
We came out alive
with roach and rat
and stand in the snow
and dare not look back.
We’ll turn into salt
if we turn to look back. [6]
By repeating the phrase “look back” in its final line the poem performs the rear view its speakers will not “dare,” evoking the temptation on the part of the speakers to turn and face what they’ve lost. In a sense the poem spares them this pain, even as its invocation of Genesis and the destruction of Sodom raises their loss to the Biblical proportion of divine judgment. The burning of the South Bronx and exodus of some 300,000 residents across the decade was a consequence of racialized redlining, municipal austerity measures, and landlord arson. Against the common misconception that low-income Puerto Rican and African American residents “deserve blame” for the fires, Replansky’s poem intuits the truth of the matter: Black and Brown residents “were victims of unanticipated economic forces, political decisions, disinvestment, and racial fear — a confluence of factors they could not control” any more than Lot’s wife could control the actions of her husband or his God. [7] Replansky’s decision to read the destruction of the borough through Jewish tradition telescopes not only her own life — born as she was in the Bronx to Russian Jews, Replansky went to P.S. 6 and then James Monroe High School before moving to Brooklyn — but also the larger phenomenon of white flight. If this poem is spoken by those made homeless by criminal neglect, it also indicts those salt-white former residents who “came out alive.”
Replansky has said that “Poetry for me is a way of mastering the world.” [8]The sculptor Michael Morgan says something similar about bricks, his favored medium: “I have come to regard the brick as an archetypal symbol, a thing that can make the unlimited world manageable, taken as it is from the earth's most elemental substance, yet pressed into a ridged geometry.” [9]
As an only-ever-partially apt metaphor for linguistic shapes, then, bricks remind us that language, the writer’s medium for making the world manageable, never fully succeed: that something — call it history — remains always unmanageable in and by language. Perhaps poetry, for Replansky, is a way of mastering the world. For readers, however, her poems live restlessly in the gap between history and what can be made of it.
2. The way bricks break apart (June Jordan)
In considering modern poetry as a form of action in the world, a line by June Jordan (1936-2002) comes in handy. The poem “47,000 Windows” (1971) reflects on the “Tenement Act of 1869,” when Lower East Side reformers, “[i]nstead of tearing down the tenements that were unfit for habitation when they were first erected…satisfied themselves by legislating phony windows blasted into the bricks.” [10] After detailing the riotous, the “polyethnic,” “beggarly,” “horrifying” history of the tenements’ construction, the poem ends as follows:
10. The Tenement Act of 1869
was merciful, well-meant, and fine
in its enforcement
tore 47,000 windows out of hellhole
shelter of no light.
It must be hard to make a window. [11]
It must be hard to make a window. What can Jordan mean? Certainly the line demands ironic voicing fit to indict the risibly half-measured plot to fix unhabitable buildings by blasting holes in the walls. [12] But when one tries to puzzle out more precise meanings, difficulties emerge. Jordan’s point can’t be that it was in fact easier to make windows than construct better buildings in the first place, because the poem is at pains to stress the ludicrous “history of American contradiction, devotion to profit, and the failure of environmental design for human life.” It is hard to make a window, in other words, if unnecessarily so, since windows are empty spaces — they shouldn’t need to be “made,” strictly speaking. The attempt to do so “was merciful, well-meant, and fine,” though also backwards and grossly insufficient. The complex tone churns up clouds of meaning that can be hard to see clearly through (another sense of making a window). And perhaps the phrase “It must be hard” expresses not a speculation about the difficulty of making windows but a necessary condition (“It must be hard to make a window,” otherwise…), as if to say that onerous reforms are the only kind allowed by the impossibilizing contradictions of American capitalism. It wouldn’t be right to suggest that Jordan’s poem is an allegory for poetry itself, because in this case Jordan is hailing what is difficult in what is possible anywhere—not just when it comes to building poems but when it comes to building buildings, to the constructive of any institutions conducive to human thriving, linguistic or otherwise.
June Jordan, Photo by Lauren Eanes.
Jordan’s long career as an organizer of such institutions began in 1967, at the East Harlem Community Resource Center. Under the auspices of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative — the first writers in the schools program — Jordan convened weekly Saturday workshops with the aid of schoolteacher Terri Bush. These early efforts toward the provision of community-based poetry would culminate, decades later, in Jordan’s long-running Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley. [13]
The Voice of the Children Anthology (1970), edited by June Jordan and Terri Bush.
While working with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Jordan kept a detailed diary which she submitted as a running report to the organization. The diary is a dramatic account of the challenges and necessity of institutionalizing the cultivation of poetic technique. The following passage is from the first page of the report, which describes her walk to the Harlem Community Resource Center on the first day of the workshop:
I approached the Center from 2nd Avenue, walking West on 117th Street and I felt cold, but I saw a beautiful brick building that rose from the broken sidewalk squares to a low height I could easily hold within my comfortable eyes and the bricks were separating one from another and the coldness of the morning was steady freeze into the separation of the bits and pieces that come together and eventually mean disintegration of shelter and of heat, which is to say, the falling apart of possibilities of survival that is worth writing about. Or living. I am not sure, any longer, that there is a difference between writing and living. Not for me. And I thought, maybe I will say that to the kids and maybe that is how we will begin writing together, this morning. I am not sure words can carry hope and longing from hand to hand and that hands can carry words into the honesty that does not separate people the way bricks break apart on cold, October mornings. [14]
There’s that “can” again, an index of risk and possibility. In what is ostensibly a funder’s report, Jordan braids themes of survival, community, writing, and the needful warmth and shelter of a brick-and-mortar institution into an image of a precarious unity in difference: the single “beautiful brick building” breaking apart before Jordan’s own “comfortable eyes.” Here, the institution — the building — evokes both what this workshop might mean for the students and teacher — “writing together,” or “hands that can carry words into the honesty that does not separate people” — and the degrees of alienation that make such a workshop necessary: “the falling apart of possibilities of survival that is worth writing about.” Among the traits that distinguish Jordan as a singular theorist of poetry’s social life is her conviction, figured here in bricks about to break apart, that we begin and begin anew the reading and making of poems by asking, every time, after the “difference between writing and living.” Maybe that’s the end of poetry, too.
Matthew Kilbane is the Glynn Family Honors Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), which received the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award, and the editor of the forthcoming volume Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures (Amherst College Press, 2025).
[1] Naomi Replansky, Collected Poems (Boston: Black Sparrow / Godine, 2012), 52.
[2] Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 276.
[3] James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 85.
[4] I borrow the phrase “microsocial effects” from the poem “Throwing Bricks” by the late Sean Bonney (1969-2019). In this poem the speaker spits blood on a Berlin sidewalk and “wonder[s] what, if any, microsocial effects my corpuscles might have on the cobblestones, kind of like if you threw a brick at a window and both of them shattered, both brick and window, and the pieces then combined and mutated and split apart and cut across corporate time and unlived time and undreamt time and well, yes, the catastrophe, whatever that is.” Sean Bonney, Our Death (Oakland: Commune Editions, 2019), 75.
[5] Naomi Replansky, Collected Poems, 85.
[6] Ibid., 82.
[7] Carolyn McLaughlin, South Bronx Battles: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Renewal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 62.
[8] Edith Chevat and Naomi Replansky, “A Talk with Naomi Replansky,” Bridges 9, no. 2 (2002):
103.
[9] Michael Morgan, “Brick as Metaphor,” Ceramics Monthly 55, no. 9 (2007).
[10] June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, Washington: 2007), 59.
[11] Ibid., 60,61, 62.
[12] Jordan apparently has in mind the “Tenement House Act of 1867”: “Here it is provided that in every building used as a tenement house, every room which is used as a sleeping room and which does not communicate directly with the external air, shall have a window or transom not less in size than 3 square feet, over the door which connects with an adjoining room.” Various writers, The Tenement House Problem: Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900, eds. Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, Vol. 11 (New York: MacMillan 1903), 284.
[13] See Lauren Muller and the Poetry for the People Collective, eds. June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (New York: Routledge, 1995).
[14] June Jordan, Civil Wars (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), 31.